Question

We have a project written in VB.NET using Visual Studio 2008 that is to be installed on 17 client machines.

We are in the process of launching the project and came accross an issue.

We have created an installer from within Visual Studio and ran the setup.exe on a client machine. All works well but if in the meanwhile we release another update, at startup the user gets a notification saying that a new version of the project is available.

Here is the link to the image as I do not have enough reputation to upload images:
http://postimage.org/image/7l7w6u841/

The problem is that the message box that pops up has an “OK” and “Cancel” button and if the users accidently click “Cancel” their program will not be updated which means that they will be running an older version which can cause issues.

My question is: Is there a way to force the user to update the project at startup, almost like “You either update or you cannot login” type of thing?

Thanks for your time and any help will be greatly appreciated

Fil

Answer 1

The easiest way might be:

• Have the info about being the latest version number be available on the server
• Have the application check this before logon
• failed request should use the number of the running version
• have the application compare this value with the running version and disallow logon if bigger

Edit

Here is some pseudocode, assuming the newest version number is at http://somewhe.re/version.txt

//Application start

System.Reflection.AssemblyName an=new System.Reflection.AssemblyName(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName);
Version current_version=an.Version;

String httptext;
Version server_version=current_version;
try {
  httptext=//Result from http://somewhe.re/version.txt
  server_version=new Version(httptext);
} catch {}

if (server_version>current_version) {
  //You must update!
}